You want to know about Dana Hunter, then, do you? I'm a science blogger, SF writer, compleat geology addict, Gnu Atheist, and owner of a - excuse me, owned by a homicidal felid. I loves me some Doctor Who and Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers. Sums me up. I'm a Midwest-born Southwesterner transplanted to the Pacific Northwest, which should explain some personality quirks, the tendency to sprinkle Spanish around, and why I'll subject you to some real jawbreakers in the place names department. My cobloggers, Karen Locke, Jacob and Steamforged, and I are delighted to be your cantineras y cantinero. Join us for una tequila. And feel free to follow @dhunterauthor on Twitter. Salud!

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EVENTS

You Voted for Death

Dear Friend Who Voted for Romney:

I’ve spent a week trying to process the fact that you voted for Mitt Romney. I still don’t know what those “conservative values” of yours are – you couldn’t tell me, and I can’t figure out what in the Republican Party platform you could agree with. I’m still hoping that you weren’t well-informed and were just voting how the people around you recommended you vote, because if you’d educated yourself on Romney’s values, lies, business practices, actions as a bishop, and history with gay classmates, and still chose him for President, then I don’t know if I ever really knew you.

But that’s not what hurt most.

The thing is, you’ve admitted you didn’t think of many things. You didn’t think of the damage Romney would do to the economy. You didn’t think of the wars we’d get in to. You didn’t think of how he’d gut FEMA, leaving people in disaster areas vulnerable to rapacious companies – if they could afford help at all. And you sure as shit didn’t think of what would happen to women of reproductive age if the Cons came back into power. You told me outright you didn’t think of me and the other women in your life when you voted for Romney.

Romney’s Web site says this would require the Supreme Court to first overturn Roe v. Wade. Then “states will be empowered through the democratic process to determine their own abortion laws and not have them dictated by judicial mandate.”

Right now, women are protected by Roe vs. Wade. Yet states with Republicans in charge are currently busy stripping away as many of our abortion rights as they can get away with. With Roe gone, they’d have nothing standing in their way. Even the most extreme Republican stance – no abortion, no exceptions, not even for rape or life of the mother – could become state law.

And I want you to take a moment right now to picture all of the women of reproductive age that you love, and then imagine them in the world you would have made possible. Imagine them being impregnated by rape or incest, and told they had to carry that child to term. Read about the complications and risks of pregnancy, and tell me whether your “conservative values” are worth forcing them to endure this against their will. Because your “conservative values” come with that cost to women. You need to understand that.

“Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar, an engineer at Boston Scientific in Galway, says she asked several times over a three-day period that the pregnancy be terminated. He says that, having been told she was miscarrying, and after one day in severe pain, Ms Halappanavar asked for a medical termination.

“This was refused, he says, because the foetal heartbeat was still present and they were told, ‘this is a Catholic country’.

“She spent a further 2½ days ‘in agony’ until the foetal heartbeat stopped.”

Then she died of a raging infection, because doctors wouldn’t abort a failed pregnancy even to save her life.

“I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.”
– Thomas Jefferson

But frankly, I’ve never been that high-minded. The problem is that these things actually matter. They aren’t abstractions; they’re ex-soldiers trapped in a lifetime of brain injury and PTSD. They’re families plunged into grief because their kids are killed in war, women dying while smug administrators moralize, gay people looking over their shoulders, and poor people struggling to see a glimmer of hope in what looks like a hopeless life.

You vote for some political sociopath, you’re telling me it’s OK if horrible stuff happens to other people, and that you live on a different moral planet than I do. With apologies to Thomas Jefferson, I just don’t know how to overlook that.

Yeah, I know someone, not really a friend, and who certainly doesn’t consider anything beyond his nose, who voted for Romney, and it still surprised me. In general I find this guy to be a moron, but WTF was he thinking? He thinks Obama is “unqualified” for not being a long-term political hack and business owner, plus there’s some middling racism involved. But despite Romney’s resumé, he’s shown himself to be exactly unqualified.

Then again, this is a guy who thinks, like many people, that a President can really do something about the economy, jobs, and the price of gas. Presidents have influence, but not control. (And as if Romney would lower the price of gas.)

Regarding AGW one of my coworkers responded: Man cannot do anything to the planet because God made it. This person is a conservative who voted for Willard and is convinced that the world is more or less coming to an end because Obama got a second term.

My libertarian friend said he doesn’t vote at all – he’d only vote if Ron Paul would have made it as the Republican candidate.
I try to explain to him that that’s almost like a vote for the wrong side, that he might as well vote for the betTER candidate, but… I guess until the world returns to a gold standard, he’s going to try to not get involved.